"We've caught him in flagratto del grando."  A still from Dear Ladies, series one.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook, for Gordon Meyer:

The text reads, "A pilcrow (¶) is so named because a 'pulled [plucked] crow' will speak paragraphs."

An illustration from an 1886 issue of Punch magazine.  The caption reads: "The New Verb: Banjo, Banjab, Banjat — Banjamus, Banjatis, Banjant!"

Here's a quotation from our Spotted in the Wild blog that we wished to share here, too:

"He that uses the word impossible outside of pure mathematics is lacking in prudence." —William Somerset Maugham, The Magician

"Sorry, I’ve had a complete blank there.”  A still from Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle bonus interviews.

"So, yes, the paragraph is arbitrary, but so is the sentence, and the word, and the phonemes within the word, and the connections we intimate between those phonemes and those arbitrary shapes we call letters." —Geof Huth

Illustration from Anthony Earnshaw's Seven Secret Alphabets.

"But why did you say Boulogne when you means Bologna?"  A still from Dear Ladies, series one.

Is there a name for the phenomenon of one language being identified but another being transcribed?  For example:

"'You are going to kill him?' she cried in German."  (From The Man Who-Couldn't Sleep by Arthur Stringer.)

And: "[Men speaking Spanish] Last night I had an ugly nightmare."

Surely the word like in this caption alerts a figure of speech, but we do respect an adventurer who recoils from exaggeration.  The illustration is from The Wide World Magazine, 1899.

"Do you always read in the original French?"
"Yes, translations are so indecent."

From Life Magazine, 1922.

"Figs and filberts": a new expression via Jonathan Caws-Elwitt.  For example:

"Let's get down to figs and filberts."
"I don't know my figs from my filberts."
"It's time to separate the figs from the filberts."
"Don't make a fig out of a filbert."

Here is some one-letter maledicta from Life, 1918.

On the magical quality of philosophical phrases: "They have something, a sort of magic — I don't know what — that makes like rich and exciting to me.  . . . I think we're thrilled by the weight of history that lies behind each one of these phrases.  It isn't just the world itself, or just its immediate meaning.  It's a long, trailing margin of human sensations, life by life, century by century, that gives us this peculiar thrill.  . . .  I know they're absurd, these phrases . . . Words like 'pluralism' and 'dualism' and 'monism.'  But what they make me think of is just a particular class of vague, delicious, physical sensations!  And it's the idea of there having been feelings like these, in far-off, long-buried human nerves, that pleases.  . . .  It makes life seem so thick and rich and complicated."  —John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

Here's a form of cartoon swearing ("maledicta") from Metropolitan Magazine, 1911 — perhaps an exclamation of "Dingbat!" without the use of any dingbats.  The caption says it's a verb, and "ding" part probably traces back to the obsolete meaning "to deal a heavy blow."

The DVD release of Anthony Newley's series The Strange World of Gurney Slade doesn't feature subtitles, so we took it upon ourselves to transliterate the following rather marvelous made-up words:

Overheard at lunch: "She calls a comforter a duvet and I want to kill her every time she does that."

It was a great (if chilling) reminder of how using the right word can prevent murderous impulses.

Jonathan Caws-Elwitt coined a new oath or expletive: "Jumping dingbats!"  He explains: "I come by it honestly, having encountered a technical glitch whereby the fancy typographical divider known as a dingbat jumps one line upward in the course of file conversion, so that the text is now divided in the wrong place."

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

Did you know that buxom has both an obsolete and an archaic meaning?  Obsolete: compliant, obliging.  Archaic: lively, good-tempered.

From Appleton's magazine, 1908.

Did you know that Santa's nightmare word is "unfilled"?  We find proof in Life, 1918.

An illustration from a 1901 issue of McClure's magazine.  The caption reads: "Filled my bosom full of smothered language."